"Searching the web
one tends to find mostly highly suspect animadversions from anti-tobacco
grumps, and ghastly and macabre stuff about murder. "There are some
commercial sites, but this is, I think, still the
only purely altruistic, non-commercial snuff website: though there is a
very welcome newsgroup for snuff enthusiasts run by Graeme
T. Steel.

"So my hope is that
by putting this out I shall receive lots of information (in
my Guestbook ) and also enhance the lives of other lonely snuff enthusiasts."

___________________________

My
thanks to the many who have sent me information since 1998 and now included
on the site.PRO
BONO PUBLICO!!_____________________________

( There are now many nore snuff sites
on the web, mostly commercial but also a few non-commercial )

Apart from murder, and oral " snuff",
snuff is any powder prepared for sniffing. Of course, the main use
of the term is for powdered tobacco.

Tobacco snuff is made by selecting tobacco
leaf (and also sometimes tobacco stalk, as in e.g. Irish High Dry Toast)
and disintegrating it into a coarse powder. It is next ground in
a manual or mechanical mill, and then sieved. Various essential oils
may then be added for flavouring, after which it is stored in airtight
containers to allow the flavour to permeate uniformly.

Way back, individuals used to have their
own little snuff mills, grinding their snuff fresh from a tobacco plug
(called a "carotte")

Oral "snuff" is very coarse milled tobacco,
not sniffed but put in the moutn: see Snuff
in the U.S.A.This website is not about forms
of oral "snuff" (illegal in Britain, though that's not why). It's
about nasal snuff.

The "scare" quotes here are to indicate
a case of local language degeneration . "sn" is a significant
phoneme in English, meaning pertaining to the nose, as in: snout,
sneeze,snore,snitch,sniff,snot,snort; and, of course, snuff.

There are plenty of reasons for giving up smoking (especially cigarettes)
of which not the least - unlike snuffing - is avoiding untimely death.
Furthermore, is not only expensive, it exposes one to the most vicious
persecution.
I have snuffed & smoked alternately for 65 years. When in 1992
I was stuck into smoking heavily, I had an operation & was not allowed
to smoke in hospital. So I went back to snuff, and on beingdischarged,
I considered: do I want to go on travelling to London in a 10-carriage
train together with half the passengers crammed into the single smoking
carriage? Do I want to spend £1460( §§§-
see below)
a year on cigarettes
(being a heavy smoker) when I can enjoy snuff for £60 a year (being
a heavy snuffer)? So I have stuck to snuff ever since, and
found no deprivation in the transition. On the contrary: I
enjoy snuff and its various flavours far more then I did smoking.
But I was lucky: I started with snuff, aged 16, and only later took up
smoking. The smoker who might think snuff is an alternative is put
off by the first pinch, when he may reel around sneezing and eyes streaming.
But it can be done, with care.
Start with a coarse, moist snuff. Don't worry about a big pinch
(the little pinch irritates more: in the 1960's I used to bet non-snuffers
£1 that they would not sneeze within one minute however much of my
snuff they took, whereupon to win the bet they would shovel it in.
I never lost.). Persevere a bit. Above all, every time, but
only when, the craving for a cigarette is urgent, take a pinch
of snuff. Eventually you will find you have lost the craving for
cigarettes, and have acquired a craving for snuff.( § §§
Following the 1980 UK Budget that sum
would now be in excess of £6500; (for a 20 a day smoker, £2100
p.a). Whereas the cost of snuff - about £75 p.a. for
3 lbs bought in bulK - has hardly risen, since 1992, The UK Government
exempted snuff from tax-- because of its not presenting a health
hazard. -- in order to encourage people to snuff rather than
to smoke )
Wilsons (Sharrow) have a daft motto (utterly silly in itself, but crazy
for a business that makes its most of its money selling snuff): "Smoke
when you can, snuff when you can't". It's as if Jack Daniels
were to adopt the motto "Drink rotgutting bathtub gin when you can,
Bourbon when you can't "

Health
Hazard
It cannot be asserted with any absolute confidence that snuff taking presents
no health hazard - possibly one even greater than the one in 1.2 billion
chance of contracting CJD from eating aT-Bone steak, the sale of which
until recently was a serious criminal offence in the UK. Indeed,
some medical research should lead to care in this matter: e.g. it was reported
by an author in the British Medical Journal Vol. 293, 16th August 1986
that while he had found neither nasal nor antroethmoidal cancer arising
in any patient within Britain who had used snuff, Root, Austin and
Sullivan had reported the case of a farmer who had placed snuff in the
left ear for 42 years, eventually developing a squamous carcinoma of the
external auditory meatus; and that moreover the high incidence of upper
jaw neoplasms among Bantu in the Transvaal might possibly be explained
by their widespread use of snuff containing charred aloe stems.
Clearly, it would be wise to avoid snuffs containing charred aloe stems,
especially if it is intended to be stuffed into the ear'ole for over forty
years.

The "Cancer Research Campaign" wrote on 8th March 1985:.
. . .there is no evidence of any association with cancer or other
health risk in the snuff produced in this country.
For this reason, snuff seems an entirely acceptable substitute for cigarette
smoking and could be recommended for addicted cigarette smokers since if
they could substitute snuff taking for cigarette smoking, they would greatly
reduce the risk to their health.A
cancer research specialist recently remarked on UK TV:
"People
smoke for the nicotine - but it's not the nicotine, it's the tar and toxic
gases that kill them."

EEC
Council Directive 92/41/EEC forced snuff retailers to affix a libel
to their products: "CAUSES CANCER". Clear evidence, not of a health
hazard, but of duplicitous bureaucratic tyranny.(Even
though the UK Government still exempts snuff from tax because of the benefits
to health of encouraging people to snuff rather than to smoke, it was forced,
despite many protests, to succumb to this diktat).
Hoewever the EEC was caused to modify this to ""This tobacco-based product
can be detrimental to your health and is addictive".
Dr.Pöschl
writes in his Nasal Snuff Tobacco ABC: " Since no tobacco is burned
when taking a pinch of snuff there is no condensate given in the same way
as when smoking tobacco..... Nasal snuff tobacco
as a smokeless environmentally friendly tobacco enjoyment is not hazardous
to health according to general scientific knowledge. Up to now no
scientist had been able to prove damage to health through the enjoyment
of nasal snuff tobacco. The contents of nasal snuff tobacco are subject
to the stringent German Food Act. That is why it is beyond understanding
why the EC authorities, certainly because they are not aware of the true
situation, stipulate health warnings in respect of this form of tobacco
enjoyment. This to our mind is wrong and only leads to misunderstandings."Click
here for more authoritative informationBack to Contents

Down
the Bloody Pit

Our champagne socialists
sentimentally bewail the wholesale closure of British coal mines (a great
irony to me, a native of South Wales, remembering how hard-working miners
in the 1930's Welsh valleys would make great sacrifices for the education
of their sons so that they "won't 'ave to go down the bloody pit!").

A more rational ground
of regret was that of the snuff chandlers: a drop in sales. Because
the danger of naked flames in coal mines prevented smoking, miners either
chewed tobacco or took snuff below ground, though they smoked like chimneys
above it.

Chewing was rather more
common than snuffing in South Wales (it was thought a great joke to flatter
the 14 year old school leaver on his first day down the mine by offering
him a plug of tobacco to chew -- then slap him on the back
so that he swallowed it and was sick for several days).

Snuffing was much more
common among the non-striking miners of Nottinghamshire

Dr.
Pöschl
writes in his Nasal Snuff Tobacco ABC: "In
the German coal mining areas particularly in the Ruhr valley ...
nasal snuff tobacco has a ... significant benefit for miners. (It) stimulates
the excretion of the nasal membrane and keeps it moist .... less
coal or stone dust gets into the nostrils."

Images
of the Ri Khasi; The RI khasi of today, with many photographsThe
Khasi Hills in N.E. India were the subject of a sustained Welsh Calvinistic
Methodist Mission in the 19th. and 20th. Century. Today there are
300,000 Khasi Presbyterians who still sing the old Welsh hymn tunes and
have regard for the Welsh for giving them a literature & saving their
language.